[GreenKeys] Fw: BBC enquiry - telegraph machine

[Don Robert House]

Robert,
I actually do not remember the type of paper.  That was July of  
1966... a while ago.
I think the undulator was single channel, Nick has one and could  
confirm.

Don


On 19 Jun 2014, at 12:22 AM, WA5CAB--- via GreenKeys wrote:

Did it by any chance use light sensitive paper?  That's what we used  
until we went digital in the late 1980's.  The somewhat smaller  
Honeywell 1858 CRT based recorders that we used up until the end  
couldn't get up to quite that speed but the Bell & Howell 12" machines  
could throw the end of the paper 15 or 20 feet before it hit the  
floor.  You didn't dare crank the transport speed up into that region  
unless you preset the number of feet of paper to spit out.  More than  
once, we had inexperienced Field Supervisors dump a full 475' roll of  
paper before they could muster the guts to get back to the machine and  
turn it off.

Back to the original subject, was the undulator a single channel device?

In a message dated 06/18/2014 23:27:56 PM Central Daylight Time, 62.5milliamps at gmail.com 
  writes:
> Absolutely Robert,
>
> The oscillograph we used in the ASCAC on the Randolph was  
> impressive.  It could stretch out a sonar ping about 5 feet wide. It  
> would scare some of our guys that had never seen it shoot paper out  
> like that before.
> Still for dial pulse work on old trunk circuits the pen or chart  
> recorder was nice and most were fairly easy to carry around.
>
>
> Don
>
>
>
> On 18 Jun 2014, at 6:00 PM, WA5CAB--- via GreenKeys wrote:
>
> Although the term "pen recorder" or the similar "chart recorder"  
> remained in use (especially among the raft of small oil patch  
> companies who built their own), the term "oscillograph" became  
> commonly used by companies like Bell &Howell, Honeywell, probably  
> Gould, etc. who built commercial multi-channel ones that  
> accomplished the recording process in various ways not limited to  
> pen and ink.
>
> In a message dated 06/18/2014 16:55:49 PM Central Daylight Time, 62.5milliamps at gmail.com 
>  writes:
>> In the Bell System we called them "Pen Recorders"  They were used  
>> with
>> old alarm circuits for fire and police.
>> We also used pen recorders, and the newer equivalent made by Gould,  
>> to
>> track voltages and troubleshoot dial pulse problems.
>>
>> Don
>> K9TTY
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 17 Jun 2014, at 11:10 AM, Jim Haynes wrote:
>>
>> An undulator is an ink recorder.  Like a slow oscillograph, the inked
>> line displays on a moving paper tape the polarity and amplitude of  
>> the
>> signal coming out of an ocean cable.  In ocean cable work they used
>> one polarity
>> for dot and the other for dash, thus gaining speed.  And they  
>> tended to
>> push the speed of signaling above the bandwidth of the cable, so that
>> the operator had to infer what was sent from the wiggles on the tape.
>>
>> Ink recorders were also used in high-speed Morse work (up to 500 wpm
>> on radio circuits) but I don't think those were called undulators.   
>> And
>> they used conventional Morse make-and-break keying so the dashes were
>> 3 times as long as the dots.
>>
>> jhhaynes at earthlink dot net
>
>
>


Robert & Susan Downs - Houston
wa5cab dot com (Web Store)
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